The invention relates to telephone networks and more particularly relates to an operations support system associated with a telephone network.
The performance of a telephone network is typically tracked by an associated Network Management System (NMS). In doing so, the NMS accumulates, and processes various reports outputted by individual facilities, e.g., switches, signaling equipments, forming the network. The reports typically include alarm messages characterizing respective network faults. The NMS stores the messages memory and thereafter displays them on the display of a user""s terminal. At that point the user may analyze the alarm reports and possibly schedule the repair of the underlying causes of the alarms. When the faults have been attended to (i.e., cleared) then a clear message is generated and the NMS removes the associated alarm message from memory.
On occasion, different telephone network elements may generate multiple alarms as a result of a single fault occurring in one of the elements. For example, a problem in a signaling network may cause a telephone switch, carrier facility and signal transfer point to each generate one or more alarms, which are forwarded to the associated NMS for processing. The NMS then displays those alarms along with a large number of other alarms generated by other network elements on the display of a user""s terminal. To help the user to identify particular network problems, the NMS may sort the alarms using a particular sorting criteria, e.g., time, severity, etc. Regardless of which sorting criteria is used, the user is still faced with viewing many displayed pages of intermingled alarms caused by different network faults. It is, therefore, difficult for the user to identify a problem which may have caused a number of different alarms to be generated.
The foregoing problem is addressed and an advancement in the art is achieved by arranging an operations support system so that it correlates related messages that are generated by different sources of messages, in which the correlation of the messages is performed in accord with a predetermined set of correlation rules priorly entered by a user. The correlation process, in accord with an aspect of the invention, (a) identifies all groups of priorly received messages associated with the newly received message, (b less than ; the newly-received message to each identified group and (c) combines all of the identified groups that may be combined in accordance with the entered rules.
A particular group(s) of correlated messages may then be displayed on the display of an associated terminal responsive to a request entered by the user via the terminal.
This and other aspects of the invention will be appreciated upon reviewing the following detailed discussion and ensuing claims.